Touchstone 1 - Stray

excited and trying not to show it.
    Tuesday, February 19
    Maze Rotation
    ‘Tsennel Rotation’ actually, but tsennel means labyrinth/maze. I’ve found a proper dictionary, to supplement my vague injected one, and have taken to looking up words and trying to fix the real definition and making annotations to connect to English.
    Breakfast was with Maze, Zee, Mara and Lohn, to talk about the day’s assignment. Lohn, of course, thought it very funny when I said that in English ‘maze’ could be labyrinth or ‘corn’ if you just go by the way it’s pronounced, though it was a bit hard to describe what corn was beyond it being a yellow vegetable. Or grain? The Taren alphabet is really strange with its ‘s’, so I’m not entirely sure whether Maze or Mase is correct. They have an ‘s’, but use it mostly at the beginning of words, and then they use this ‘ts’ letter a lot of the time, and there’s an awful lot of ‘z’ when I would expect ‘s’, like how they pronounce my name ‘Caszandra’.
    Anyway, Maze Rotation is what they consider a fairly tough assignment, partly because of its size and the need for close combat, and also because they’ve encountered new types of Ionoth there from time to time. Lohn was saying that the spaces we’ve worked in this week have been reasonably straightforward, and that now they were going to try me out in the ‘weird and confusing’ territories. The way he talked about it made me wonder if the spaces weren’t so much the memories as the nightmares of planets.
    “What toughest rotation?” I asked, as we walked to our assigned gate-lock.
    “Unstables,” Zee said. “Spaces which have moved up against Tare’s near-space, but which we haven’t encountered before. For everything else, even Columns, we know what we’re going up against, and they choose which teams to assign based on that. If we sent Eighth into Maze Rotation, for instance, they’d kill themselves in the first few minutes. While Ninth couldn’t handle Lights Rotation because you need strong ranged abilities for that mountainside. We can manage either, but at the same time neither is as easy as it would for a team with exactly the right talent set. It’s been a big step forward, having specialist teams.”
    “How long, younger teams active?”
    “About seven years, for Three to Six. Eleven and Twelve, coming up on one year. Thirteen and Fourteen will be made active in the next year. The aim is to have sufficient squads to keep the near-space clear, and increase exploration and searches for the Pillars.”
    It took me a minute to remember that a ‘year’ here was only four months. “How many Pillars are there?”
    Zee lifted her hands, then let them drop. “We only confirmed three years ago that they truly exist. And, presuming that rotational space does realign, we’re only just coming up to our first chance to properly examine one. The knowledge of how the things were constructed, and what exactly they’re doing, has long been lost.”
    “Exciting days ahead,” Lohn put in cheerfully, and then we reached our gate-lock and it was time for the mission to be officially logged and to call each other by surname and be all serious.
    There were only two spaces involved in the Maze Rotation. The first seemed to be the inside of a house, all cramped walls and sketches of furniture and a shadow by a corner which might have once been an old lady. And then there was the maze.
    It was exactly that: a huge maze of white stone covered in a climbing plant with small almond-shaped leaves. The walls looked to me to be really similar to the stone which the Taren and Muinan buildings are made of, so I guess it was a memory of one of those worlds, or another where the Muinans had gone. The walls were really high – twenty feet at least – and right above it the sky looked scratched and rubbed out. But there were clover flowers in the grassy paths below and it had an austere English garden feeling which made me like it despite it being dangerous.
    “The walls have a resistance to talents,” Maze said through the interface, once we were all through the gate. “Reflecting or dampening them unpredictably. We will be close-fighting almost exclusively in here, and keeping very near to each other. Avoid touching the walls; we’ve found that seems to draw increased attention from any Ionoth in the space. Follow Spel’s lead, staying on her left, and communicate only through the interface.”
    I nodded,